Winners of the 2012 Co-Creation Awards Announced

by Yannig Roth

The organizers of the Co-Creation Awards, the world’s first global award to benchmark excellence in co-creation, have announced the winners of the 2012 competition at a ceremony on the Cap Gemini campus in Utrecht, The Netherlands. After following Gaurav Bhalla‘s keynote speech about co-creation and collaboration, as well as attending workshop sessions about co-creation, the attendees of the event and representatives of the nominated discovered who were the winners among a list of 16 nominees in 4 categories. And the winners are…

In the “For Profit Innovation” category, the award for the best use of co-creation went to Jeppesen Sanderson Inc. for the development of Mobile FliteDeck, a paperless navigation tool for iPad. The American company, a subsidiary of The Boeing Company that specializes in the development of navigational solutions for the transport industry, has used co-creation by involving pilots in the creation of the industry’s first interactive mobile enroute flight application.

Jeff Buhl, Jeppesen’s Product Manager for the Mobile FliteDeck app, said that “through co-creation with the pilot community, we have been able to come up with a solution that fits the target audience’s needs while being in line with the many regulatory requirements of the aviation industry.” He was present in Utrecht to receive the award from the hands of Jeroen de Kempenaer, Board member of the PDMA Netherlands and Chair of the Co-Creation Awards jury, who underlined how impressed the jury was by this case in the airline industry.

In the “Non Profit Innovation” category, the Co-Creation Award for the best use of co-creation is the idea contest Stilsicher Unterwegs, launched by the German association of seniors Deutsche Seniorenliga together with Hyve, the Munich-based co-creation specialist. The objective of the initiative was to generate novel solutions and ideas about walker-frames, thus de-stigmatizing the usage of this necessary companion for seniors.

“The initiative proved that product development can be done for and with senior citizens,” said Erhard Hackler, Chairman of the German League of Senior called Deutsche Senoirenliga, present at the ceremony. “This award can help in this way to promote what we call: silver innovation,” he said. The jury recognized this case as especially innovative to the extent that it targeted seniors, an audience that tends to be left aside in numreous co-creation initiatives.

In the category “For Profit Marketing & Communication” it’s theFacebook game World Food Game by Rabobank that got rewarded as the best use of co-creation. The Dutch bank wanted the youth to learn more about cooperative enterpreneurship, and involved youngsters between 16 and 25 years through online & offline co-creation sessions to co-create the game.

“The most important that we learned from the co-creation process is to let go of traditional project management methods,” said Maarten Molenaar, the World Food Game Project Manager at Rabobank, who was happy to receive the awards on behalf of the whole team that worked with him on the project. The case caught the jury’s attention as an intriguing combination of gaming and co-creation, which is a growing trend in external stakeholder engagement.

The 2012 Co-Creation Award in the “Not For Profit Marketing & Communication” category went to the Japanese agency Asatsu-DK, and particularly the Stand For Japan contest. The global contest was designed to source insights from foreigners about what they see as truly unique to Japanese culture, asking them to “Tell us about the Japan you love.” Some of the artwork and videos were later exhibited at the underground square of Tokyo Station, from July 2012 to October 2012, and at Adtech Tokyo in November 2012.

“2011 was a tough year for Japan,” said Yuli Kim from ADK, who also came to Utrecht to receive the award on behalf of the people who worked on the project. “This co-creation initiative was a great opportunity to be, in this way, part of this recovery process,” she explained.

All these winning case studies were rewarded for their excellent co-creative approach, with external stakeholders being involved in the innovate- or communication-process of these organizations. The jury was which is composed by five prestigious members from the press, from business as well as academia: Olivia Solon, Associate Editor of Wired UK, Jeroen de Kempenaer, Board member of the PDMA Netherlands and Senior Consultant with The Bridge business innovators,Gaurav Bhalla, Author of Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation, Frank Piller, Chair professor of management and Director of the Technology & Innovation Management Group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and Jaco van Zijll Langhout, Principal Consultant for Digital Transformation & Innovation at Capgemini Consulting.

The Co-Creation Awards was created in 2010 by the Co-Creation Association, now a Special Interest Group of the PDMA. The 2012 Co-Creation Award is made possible through a coalition of partners working together to promote co-creation: The PDMA.NL, the Co-Creation Association, the Co-Creation Forum, Capgemini Consulting and eYeka. François Pétavy, CEO eYeka and co-founder of the Co-creation Forum said about the event: “We have entered the age of participation. It is vital that we invest in educating the business world about the value that co-creation brings when used strategically. That is why eYeka was supporting the 2012 Co-Creation Awards, to inspire marketers and their agencies to embrace a more open, collaborative model to innovating their brand, products, and business.”

Yannig Roth graduated in marketing and is currently Research Fellow at eYeka and PhD student at University Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris (France). His main research interests are creative crowdsourcing and community co-creation. Yannig regularly blogs at https://yannigroth.wordpress.com